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China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs now spreading the conspiracy theory that Moderna created Covid. New York Times reporter Paul Mozur: Hard to believe they don't see the credibility they lose amplifying this stuff. Takeaway is still no sign the wolf warrior approach has been reconsidered. [...] It underscores how the CAC quashes rumors it doesn't like, but let's those of political expediency flourish within China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple argued in court papers this week that appeals filings by Epic Games don't point to legal errors by a US District Court judge who ruled last year that the iPhone maker hadn't violated antitrust laws with its App Store. Instead, Apple cited the many times the judge said Epic had "failed to demonstrate," "failed to show" and "failed to prove" the facts of its case. From a report: "On the facts and the law, the court correctly decided every issue presented in Epic's appeal," Apple lawyers wrote in the company's filing. They repeated earlier arguments that Epic is attempting to fundamentally change the App Store. "While these appeals are both important and complex, resolving the issues should not be difficult: Applying settled precedent to the adjudicated facts requires ruling for Apple across the board." Apple's 135-page filing is the latest in the legal battle it's been fighting with Epic since August 2020. On the surface, the two companies are battling over who gets how much when consumers spend money on the App Store. Apple is fighting to maintain control of its App Store, which has become such a key feature of its iPhones that the company's ads saying "there's an app for that" are referenced in crossword puzzles and on the trivia TV show Jeopardy. Over the past couple of years, though, Apple's runaway success with its App Store has been challenged. Epic, which makes the hit online battle game Fortnite, argued that Apple should loosen its control. In emails, court filings and public statements, Epic has said Apple should allow alternative app stores onto the iPhone and iPad, something it currently doesn't allow. Epic also says Apple should free developers to use alternative payment processors in their apps, rather than Apple's current rule requiring they use only its App Store, through which Apple takes a cut of in-app purchases on its devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. From a report: "Music," wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, "has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation." A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers -- that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life. A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed "music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing," as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd is working with whistleblowing agency Lioness to share information about kickbacks and bribery in the Middle East and North Africa. From a report: In June 2019, former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney General's office to discuss his allegations that Microsoft was ignoring bribery at subsidiaries in the Middle East and Africa. The meetings lasted nearly the entire day. Federal agents asked Elabd questions for hours. Elabd's attorney told him that it was one of the first times they had witnessed the AG's office send a representative to a whistleblower meeting like his. But more than a year later, the SEC still hadn't made a decision about Elabd's allegations. The agency kept promising him that the team in charge of his case would make a decision soon about whether they would bring charges against Microsoft. Finally, at the beginning of March 2022, the case agent in charge of Elabd's whistleblowing report told his lawyer that the SEC was closing the case because it didn't have the resources to conduct interviews and find documentation abroad during the coronavirus pandemic. So Elabd decided to try a different route to share what he knows. Today he published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness that accuses Microsoft of firing him after two decades with the company because he asked questions about what he saw as bribery within the contracting services Microsoft uses to sell software to government and public bodies in countries in the Middle East and Africa.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's upcoming MacBook Air redesign has been extensively reported on, but new information suggests it may come in two sizes. According to Display Supply Chain Consultants' latest quarterly report, Apple is working on a 15-inch version of the laptop to sit alongside the 13-inch model, which may itself get a slightly larger screen as well. TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo followed up on the report, saying that mass production is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023. Kuo also says that the laptop is being designed to use the same 30W adapter as the MacBook Air, which would put it well below the latest MacBook Pro machines in terms of power consumption. Finally, Kuo notes that this new laptop "might not be called MacBook Air," which is more of a question of branding than anything else and is likely to be in the realm of speculation for a product that's so far out from production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. and the European Union reached a preliminary deal to allow data about Europeans to be stored on U.S. soil, heading off a growing threat to thousands of companies' trans-Atlantic operations. From a report: The deal, announced Friday by President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, could if concluded resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. It also assuages concerns of companies including Meta and Alphabet's Google that were facing mounting legal challenges to data transfers that underpin some of their operations in Europe. An earlier deal regulating trans-Atlantic data flows was deemed illegal by the EU's top court in 2020. That ruling was the second time since 2015 that the EU's Court of Justice had deemed U.S. safeguards on Europeans' data to be insufficient. The court said the U.S. didn't provide EU citizens effective means to challenge U.S. government surveillance of their data. Mr. Biden and Ms. von der Leyen didn't provide details of how the new agreement would work and withstand legal challenges. At issue in the talks has been whether the U.S. could convince the EU -- and its top court -- with new administrative appeals mechanisms for Europeans, but without a change to U.S. law, which would require approval by Congress, people briefed on the talks have said in recent months. Officials and observers on both sides of the Atlantic expect any new agreement to be challenged in court again, raising uncertainty about how long Friday's deal will last.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, one secretive U.S. company is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won't be able to take down. The company is Lantern, which says it has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But now the company is building something even more robust, an internal peer-to-peer network that will allow dissenting voices to continue to upload and share content even if the Kremlin pulls the plug on the internet. Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked. [...] Lantern was founded in California in 2010 with the goal of keeping "the world's information, speech, expression, and finance uncensored." The free version of the app has a data cap of 500MB, but the pro version, which costs $32 a year, has no data cap. It has become hugely popular in China because of its ability to stay one step ahead of the government's censorship efforts, spreading mainly via word-of-mouth as it's not available via the Google or Apple app stores inside China. n Russia, like all new markets it enters, Lantern removed the data cap for all users. Despite this, some users still paid for the pro version.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Techdirt's Timothy Geigner, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation was recently rendered unplayable because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game crumbled during a maintenance window. From the report: "The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning," reports Ars Technica. "Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that 'due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'" "Inconvenience" in this case means not being able to play the game the customer purchased. Like, basically at all. Why the single player content in a console game of all things should require an online check-in is completely beyond me. Console piracy is a thing, but certainly not much of a thing. There is zero chance that this DRM is worth the headache Sony now has on its hands. A headache that lasted for more than a full calendar day, by the way. And a headache that Sony's competitors picked up on to use in messaging to the public on social media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world's toughest rules to protect people's online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. [...] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple's in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission. Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads -- based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook -- are immensely lucrative for both companies. [...] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight -- just like health care, transportation and banking industries."Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were 'too big to care,' Europe has put its foot down," said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. "We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide." On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks -- a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy -- and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft's DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix's Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD. As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken's numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API -- from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives -- dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy. On the other hand, Ono's demo showed that game load time wasn't improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage -- nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That's a decrease that wouldn't be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you're using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That's a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Japanese startup called H2L Technologies wants you to be able to feel pain inside the metaverse, via a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks. Futurism reports: "Feeling pain enables us to turn the metaverse world into a real [world], with increased feelings of presence and immersion," H2L CEO Emi Tamaki told the Financial Times. The Sony-backed startup's wearable isn't designed with only inflicting pain in mind. It's also meant to convey "weight and resistance feeling to users and avatars on the Metaverse," according to the company. Thanks to the wristband's electrical stimulation, it can mimic a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer's skin. Tamaki's goals are much greater than a simple wristband. She's hoping to "release humans from any sort of constraint in terms of space, body and time" within the next decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas Brooks, an avid Windows fan who digs through and analyzes its early iterations, recently shared his discovery of an easter egg that's been hiding in Windows 1.0 for nearly 37 years. PC Gamer reports: Brooks discovered the secret, a credits list of Windows developers and a "congratulations" message, buried in the data of a smiley face bitmap file that came with the OS. The data for the credits was encrypted, and according to Brooks, the tools he needed to extract the data didn't even exist at the time of the OS' release. There's also a name in the credits all PC gamers will recognize: Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. Newell began his career at Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard, and contributed to the development of the first three iterations of Windows. He also led the team that ported Doom to Windows from DOS, a crucial step in the transition between the operating systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Police in the United Kingdom have arrested seven people over suspected connections to the Lapsus$ hacking group, which has in recent weeks targeted tech giants including Samsung, Nvidia, Microsoft and Okta. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan from the City of London Police said: "The City of London Police has been conducting an investigation with its partners into members of a hacking group. Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation. Our enquiries remain ongoing." News of the arrests comes just hours after a Bloomberg report revealed a teenager based in Oxford, U.K. is suspected of being the mastermind of the now-prolific Lapsus$ hacking group. Four researchers investigating the gang's recent hacks said they believed the 16-year-old, who uses the online moniker "White" or "Breachbase," was a leading figure in Lapsus$, and Bloomberg was able to track down the suspected hacker after his personal information was leaked online by rival hackers. TechCrunch has seen a copy of the the suspected hacker's leaked personal information, which we are not sharing -- but it matches Bloomberg's reporting. City of London Police, which primarily focuses on financial crimes, did not say if the 16-year-old was among those arrested. At least one member of Lapsus$ was also apparently involved with a recent data breach at Electronic Arts, according to [security reporter Brian Krebs], and another is suspected to be a teenager residing in Brazil. The latter is said to be so capable of hacking that researchers first believed that the activity they were witnessing was automated. Researchers' ability to track the suspected Lapsus$ members may be because the group, which now has more than 45,000 subscribers to its Telegram channel where it frequently recruits insiders and leaks victims' data, does little to cover its tracks. In a blog post this week, Microsoft said the group uses brazen tactics to gain initial access to a target organization, which has included publicly recruiting company insiders. As reported by Bloomberg this week, the group has even gone as far as to join the Zoom calls of companies they've breached and taunted employees trying to clean up their hack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. The Verge reports: The archive was never built to be a permanent repository of content, and maintaining the outdated site was no longer "cost effective," the EPA said to The Verge in an emailed statement. The EPA announced the retirement early this year, after finishing an overhaul of its main website in 2021, but says that the decision was years in the making. The agency maintains that it's abiding by federal rules for records management and that not all webpages qualify as official records that need to be preserved. The EPA says it plans to migrate much of the information to other places. Old news releases will go to the current EPA website's page for press releases. When it comes to the rest of the content, the EPA has a process for making case-by-case decisions on what content can be deleted -- and what is relevant enough to move to the modern website. Some content might be deemed important enough to join the National Archives. The public will be able to request that content through the Freedom of Information Act. The archive is the only comprehensive way that public information about agency policies, like fact sheets breaking down the impact of environmental legislation, and actions, like how the agency implements those laws, have been preserved, [says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the cofounders of a group called Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that's fighting for public access to resources like the EPA's online archives]. That makes the archive vital for understanding how regulation and enforcement have changed over the years. It also shows how the agency's understanding of an issue, like climate change, has evolved. And when the Trump administration deleted information about climate change on the EPA's website, much of it could still be found on the archive. Besides that, Gehrke says the content should just be available on principle because it's public information, paid for by taxpayer dollars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub has introduced a new feed into the dashboard of users and it doesn't appear to have gone down well with the code shack's regulars. The Register reports: As soon as the new feed arrived, replete with all kinds of exciting suggestions for developers to look at, the complaints began rolling in as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. "I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don't follow," said one user. "Don't fix what's not broken." Others were blunter, stating: "I don't want algorithmic feed" and requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered â" issues, releases, PRs and so on. GitHub pushed out a new beta version of its Home Feed earlier this week, with the avowed intention of developers reaching a wider audience and building communities. The plan is to make discovery easier and help users "find new repositories or users to follow based on your interests." As if to demonstrate the levels of discontent around GitHub's new feature, a Chrome extension quickly showed up to disable the social feed by removing the "For You" section on the GitHub dashboard. Not all users were upset by the appearance of the new feed, and GitHub staff popped up to promise that there would be an option to make one's profile private and opt out of pretty much everything via a single setting. It will, however, take until late April before this option is likely to appear, they said. Which prompted the obvious question: "Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A hacker group claims to have stolen and leaked a trove of Nestle's data. The company says that can't possibly be true. Why? Because the data was actually leaked by Nestle itself several weeks ago. In emails to Gizmodo, a Nestle spokesperson disavowed allegations from the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which claimed this week to have stolen and leaked a 10 gigabyte tranche from the global food and beverage conglomerate. Anonymous said it was punishing Nestle for its reticence to withdraw from Russia, as a host of other major companies have done. The data, which Anonymous said included internal emails, passwords, and information on Nestle's customers, was posted to the web on Tuesday. But, according to Nestle, Anonymous is full of it. A spokesperson told Gizmodo, "This recent claim of a cyber-attack against Nestle and subsequent data leak has no foundation." The spokesperson explained that the trove of data floating around the web was, in fact, the product of a mistake the company made earlier this year: "It relates to a case from February, when some randomized and predominantly publicly available test data of a B2B nature was made accessible unintentionally online for a short period of time." [...] In a follow-up email, the same company spokesperson explained that the data, some of which was already public and some of which was not, had been accidentally published to the open internet for multiple weeks. According to the spokesperson: "Some predominantly publicly-available data (e.g., company names and company addresses and some business email addresses) was erroneously made available on the web for a limited period of time (a few weeks). It was detected by our security team at the time and the appropriate review was carried out. The data was prepared for a B2B test website to perform some functionality checks." Nestle on Wednesday said it planned to partly scale back its operations in Russia, continuing to provide "essential food, such as infant food and medical/hospital nutrition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Threat Analysis Group announced on Thursday that it had discovered a pair of North Korean hacking cadres going by the monikers Operation Dream Job and Operation AppleJeus in February that were leveraging a remote code execution exploit in the Chrome web browser. From a report: The blackhatters reportedly targeted the US news media, IT, crypto and fintech industries, with evidence of their attacks going back as far as January 4th, 2022, though the Threat Analysis Group notes that organizations outside the US could have been targets as well. "We suspect that these groups work for the same entity with a shared supply chain, hence the use of the same exploit kit, but each operate with a different mission set and deploy different techniques," the Google team wrote on Thursday. "It is possible that other North Korean government-backed attackers have access to the same exploit kit." Operation Dream Job targeted 250 people across 10 companies with fraudulent job offers from the likes of Disney and Oracle sent from accounts spoofed to look like they came from Indeed or ZipRecruiter. Clicking on the link would launch a hidden iframe that would trigger the exploit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israel blocked Ukraine from buying NSO Group's Pegasus spyware for fear that Russian officials would be angered by the sale of the sophisticated hacking tool to a regional foe, The Guardian reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The revelation, following a joint investigation by the Guardian and Washington Post, offers new insight into the way Israel's relationship with Russia has at times undermined Ukraine's offensive capabilities -- and contradicted US priorities. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been critical of Israel's stance since Russia launched its full and bloody invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, saying in a recent address before members of Israel's Knesset that Israel would have to "give answers" on why it had not given weapons to Ukraine or applied sanctions on Russians. People with direct knowledge of the matter say that, dating back to at least 2019, Ukrainian officials lobbied Israel to try to convince it to license the spyware tool for use by Ukraine. But those efforts were rebuffed and NSO Group, which is regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, was never permitted to market or sell the company's spyware to Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google executives, facing a barrage of criticism from employees on issues related to compensation, defended the company's competitiveness at a recent all-hands meeting while acknowledging that the performance review process could change. From a report: The companywide virtual gathering earlier this month followed the release of internal survey results, which showed a growing number of staffers don't view their pay packages as fair or competitive with what they could make elsewhere. At all-hands meetings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior executives regularly read top submissions from Dory, a site where employees write questions and give a thumbs up to those they want leadership to address. The second highest-rated question ahead of the March meeting was about the annual "Googlegeist" survey. As CNBC reported, the lowest scores from the survey, which went out to employees in January, were in the areas of compensation and execution. "Compensation-related questions showed the biggest decrease from last year, what is your understanding of why that is?" Pichai read aloud from the employee submissions. According to the survey results, only 46% of respondents said their total compensation is competitive compared to similar jobs at other companies. Bret Hill was first to respond. Hill is Google's vice president of "Total Rewards," which refers to compensation and stock packages. "There's some macro economic trends at play," Hill said. "It's a very competitive market and you're probably hearing anecdotal stories of colleagues getting better offers at other companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After seemingly forgetting that Android tablets existed for a while, Google is suddenly very invested in the market. Android 12L is in development to support larger-screened devices, and one of the platform's co-founders, Rich Miner, has rejoined the team with the title "CTO of Android tablets." Now, speaking to developers during an episode of Google's The Android Show, Miner explained the opportunity the company is seeing. [...] The other reason he cites is that tablets can be "very capable, less expensive than a laptop." That spurred Google's work on Android 12L to optimize its system UI for use on bigger devices, as well as the way it formats apps to fit on big screens. Miner is making the pitch for developers to look at their apps and consider taking advantage of the tools Google's building to improve tablet support or even building apps that approach the market as a tablet-first experience. He points to 2020 sales data, where "tablet purchases actually started to approach the number of laptop shipments... I actually think there's going to be a crossover point at some point in the not too distant future where there are more tablets sold annually than there are laptops. I think once you cross over that point, you're not going to be coming back."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba shareholders on Thursday voted down competing proposals -- one presented by management and the other backed by activist shareholders, leaving the future direction of the embattled Japanese conglomerate uncertain. From a report: Management's plan to spin off Toshiba's devices unit and the separate call to seek buyout offers had both failed to gain the required 50% of the vote. The untidy outcome ensures there will be no immediate end to a four-year scandal-filled battle between management and foreign activist hedge funds, while underscoring deep divisions among Toshiba shareholders. Opposition to Toshiba's plans to break up the company had been widespread and included proxy advisory firms, and its failure comes as no surprise. But the outlook for Singapore-based 3D Investment Partners' proposal that Toshiba solicit private equity buyout offers or a minority investment had been less clear cut. Although 3D and Toshiba's other top two shareholders had supported the quest for a buyout offer, proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) had advised against it, saying the proposal "appears overly prescriptive and premature."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the internet-popular short-video format, the GIF, has died. He was 74. From a report: His wife, Kathaleen, said Thursday in a phone interview that he died of COVID on March 14. Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, won a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which decades after its creation became omnipresent in memes and on social media, often used as a cheeky representation of a cultural moment. Wilhite was working at CompuServe in 1987 when he invented the GIF. "I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming," he told The New York Times in 2013, saying the first image was an airplane and insisting that the file had only one pronunciation - a soft "G," like Jif peanut butter. Those using the hard "G," as in "got" or "given," "are wrong," he said. "End of story." "There's way more to him than inventing GIF," Kathaleen Wilhite said of her husband, who loved trains, with a room dedicated to them in the basement of their house with "enormous train tracks," as well as taking camping trips. Still, even after he retired in 2001, "he never stopped programming," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla today launched MDN Plus, a paid subscription product on top of the existing (and recently re-designed) Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), one of the web's most popular destinations for finding documentation and code samples related to web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. From a report: The new subscription offering will introduce features like notifications, collections (think lists of articles you want to save) and MDN offline for when you want to access MDN when you're not online. There will be three subscription tiers: MDN core, a free limited version of the paid plans; MDN Plus 5, with access to notifications, collections and MDN offline for $5 per month or $50 per year; and MDN Supporter 10 for those who are willing to pay a bit more to support the platform in addition to getting a direct feedback channel to the MDN team (as well as "pride and joy," Mozila says). As the name implies, that more expensive plan will cost $10 a month or $100 for an annual subscription.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is working on a subscription service for the iPhone and other hardware products, a move that could make device ownership similar to paying a monthly app fee, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The service would be Apple's biggest push yet into automatically recurring sales, allowing users to subscribe to hardware for the first time -- rather than just digital services. But the project is still in development, said the people, who asked not to identified because the initiative hasn't been announced, Bloomberg News reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The global umbrella organisation for securities regulators has warned that decentralised finance contains myriad hidden conflicts and risks, as authorities begin circling one of the fastest growing corners of cryptocurrency markets. From a report: Comparing the current rise of decentralised finance, or DeFi, to the dotcom bubble, Martin Moloney, secretary-general of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (Iosco), said its explosive growth warranted "closer attention by regulators." Iosco on Thursday plans to publish a 43-page report on DeFi listing more than a dozen "key risks" it has identified in the market. Moloney said the group would gather feedback from market participants and consider drafting guidelines for regulating DeFi. "Most DeFi protocols rely on centralisation in one or more areas, and there are protocols that have a hidden centralised authority and are decentralised in name only," the board of Iosco wrote in the report, which was reviewed by the Financial Times. "What we're seeing is a lot of conflicts of interest are emerging in this space, and a lot of them are not transparent,â Moloney told the FT in an interview. "A lot of the participants in this space are claiming to be doing one thing and actually doing another thing, or actually doing multiple things at the same time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung's new portable projector disappoints, multiple reviewers noted today. The Verge: The Freestyle could have been something really special. As Samsung's first portable projector, it immediately stood out from all of the company's other CES product announcements in January. What wasn't to like? At under two pounds, the Freestyle was hyped as tiny in form but big on features and convenience. The device is compact enough to be packed in a bag for travel or bringing on camping trips. It'd be a cinch to set up The Freestyle in the backyard for movie night, and the projector can run off some portable USB-C battery packs for added flexibility. Want an easy way to entertain your kids on vacation? Here you go. You can point the 180-degree tilting projector in a wide range of directions -- including at the ceiling. And since it has the same software as Samsung's smart TVs, it comes with a vast selection of entertainment apps in tow. What Samsung has shipped is a dim, flawed, and often sluggish projector that fails to realize its potential. For a company that's been on a run of home theater hits with products like The Frame, this is an uncharacteristic misstep. It's not a cheap one, either: The Freestyle costs $899.99. That awkward price can be seen as another illustration of the projector's challenges. It's far more expensive than many portable pico projectors from smaller brands such as Anker and Xgimi but nowhere near as pricey as top-shelf home projectors. The Freestyle is caught in a no man's land: if the asking price had been higher, maybe Samsung could've gone more ambitious on specs -- especially brightness, which I'll get to later. And if it were cheaper, I might've been more forgiving of its underwhelming performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber is becoming friends with a former foe. The company has reached an agreement to list all New York City taxis on its app, an alliance that could ease the ride-hailing giant's driver shortage and temper high fares while directing more business to cabdrivers, whose livelihoods were affected by the emergence of car-sharing apps and the pandemic. From a report: While Uber has formed partnerships with some taxi operators overseas, and riders in several U.S. cities can use its app to book taxis if cabdrivers choose to be listed there, the New York City alliance is its first citywide partnership in the U.S. New York, one of Uber's most lucrative markets, has been a battlefield for the company and the city's iconic yellow taxis for years. "It's bigger and bolder than anything we've done," said Andrew Macdonald, Uber's global mobility chief. The company expects to launch the offering to riders later this spring. As part of the deal, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission's licensed technology partners will integrate their taxi-hailing apps' software with Uber's. Those apps -- run by Creative Mobile Technologies and Curb Mobility -- are used by the city's roughly 14,000 taxis, according to Uber. The two companies enable credit-card payments in taxis and also run the screens that display the weather, news and ads to riders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece: Protest is an important element of free speech that should be protected. Openness and inclusivity are cornerstones of the culture of open source, and the tools of open source communities are designed for global access and participation. Collectively, the very culture and tooling of open source -- issue tracking, messaging systems, repositories -- offer a unique signaling channel that may route around censorship imposed by tyrants to hold their power. Instead of malware, a better approach to free expression would be to use messages in commit logs to send anti-propaganda messages and to issue trackers to share accurate news inside Russia of what is really happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian military, to cite two obvious possibilities. There are so many outlets for open source communities to be creative without harming everyone who happens to load the update. We encourage community members to use both the freedoms and tools of open source innovatively and wisely to inform Russian citizens about the reality of the harm imposed on Ukrainian citizens and to support humanitarian and relief efforts in and supportive of Ukraine. Longer term, it's likely these weaponizations are like spitting into the wind: The downsides of vandalizing open source projects far outweigh any possible benefit, and the blowback will ultimately damage the projects and contributors responsible. By extension, all of open source is harmed. Use your power, yes -- but use it wisely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recruitment ad hits social media feeds of mobile phones located outside or inside the diplomatic compound. From a report: The FBI is trying a novel strategy to recruit Russian-speaking individuals upset about the country's invasion of Ukraine: aiming social media ads at cellphones located inside or just outside the Russian Embassy in Washington. The ads, which appear on Facebook, Twitter and Google, are carefully geographically targeted. A Washington Post reporter standing next to the embassy's stone walls on Wednesday morning received the ad in their Facebook feed. But the ads did not appear in the feed when the reporter stood on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue NW, in the District's Glover Park neighborhood. The ads are designed to capitalize on any dissatisfaction or anger within Russian diplomatic or spy services -- or among Russian emigres to the United States -- over the invasion of Ukraine, an event that counterintelligence experts call a huge opportunity for the U.S. intelligence community to recruit new sources. The unlikely star of the campaign is Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own words are used to encourage people working in or visiting the embassy to talk to the FBI. The ad quotes Putin at a meeting last month where he publicly chastised his intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, correcting the spy boss's position on Russian policy toward the separatist eastern regions of Ukraine. Naryshkin, the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, stammered at the meeting and seemed unsure of what Putin wanted him to say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: If you've ever eaten okra, then you'll know that the stuff can be pretty gooey. According to new research, that quality could allow a compound from the plant to be used in a less toxic method of removing microplastics from drinking water. [...] After some experimentation, it was found that polysaccharides from okra paired with those from fenugreek worked best at removing microplastics from seawater, while those same okra polysaccharides paired with those from tamarind were best for use on freshwater. All in all, depending on factors such as the ratio of the polysaccharides and the water source, the plant-based flocculants performed either as well as or better than polyacrylamide. And importantly, they could be used in existing water treatment plants, without any alterations to the facilities or processes. The scientists are now investigating how well other combinations of plant-derived polysaccharides will work on specific types of plastic microparticles, in water from a variety of sources. The findings have been reported via EurekAlert. The American Chemical Society Meeting Newsroom channel on YouTube also produced a video about the research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: When he was 25, materials scientist Ernesto Di Maio developed a yeast allergy and broke out in hives whenever he ate pizza, which was somewhat embarrassing for a son of Naples, Italy. "My wife loves pizza, and this sometimes creates tension on the night menu," he says. Now, Di Maio can look forward to carefree dinners, for he and his colleagues have invented a yeast-free method of leavening pizza dough. In a classically prepared pizza, as with most bread, yeast ferments and releases carbon dioxide to give the dough a foamlike consistency. Baking then drives off the water and locks in the airy texture. Di Maio's team at the University of Naples Federico II (UNINA) thought it might be able to produce the same effect in a different way: by infusing the dough with gas at high pressure and releasing the pressure during baking, adapting a method they'd developed to manufacture polyurethane. "The aim was to try to make the same texture that we love so much in pizza without a chemical agent," says co-author and UNINA materials scientist Rossana Pasquino. [...] The end result: "We tried it, and it was nice and crusty and soft," Di Maio says.Alessio Cappelli, a food technologist at the University of Florence, says the paper is "interesting," but he wonders whether the method will be widely used in practice, given that baker's yeast is so cheap and easy. "It looks like an innovation just for the sake of it," he says. The study has been published in the journal Physics of Fluids.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Phys.org reports: Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation (PDF) at this year's 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlining the findings by the team. [...] Chide reported that the team has used data from the microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. This was done by measuring the amount of time it took for sounds emanating from laser blasts from Perseverance to return to the rover's microphone. The laser blasts were used to vaporize nearby rocks to learn more about their composition. They found sound to be traveling on Mars at approximately 240 m/s. But they also found that different frequencies of sound travel at different speeds on Mars. The speed increases by approximately 10 m/s above 400 Hz. This finding suggests that communication would be extremely difficult on Mars with different parts of speech arriving to listeners at different times, making conversations sound garbled. Chide says the microphone also allowed for measuring temperature on Mar's surface in and around the rover. This is because sound travels at different speeds depending on temperature. By measuring sound speed every time Perseverance fired its laser, the researchers were able to calculate rapid temperature changes. Chide also noted that the research team plans to continue monitoring and analyzing sounds from Mars over the course of a year to learn more about fluctuations during different events on the planet, such as during the winter months or when dust storms kick up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last June, the Department of Defense released a long-awaited and much-hyped document called "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," detailing the government's knowledge of UFOs and its programs trying to detect and catalog them. Many UFOlogists hoped that the "UFO report" would be a watershed moment in the field, showing that the government was taking UFOs seriously and, perhaps, explaining what the government thought they were. Unfortunately, the nine-page report was pretty underwhelming; for the most part it revealed things we already knew, and read primarily like a plea from the DoD for more funding. Tantalizingly, we were told that members of Congress received a classified briefing with more information that would likely never be released to the public. John Greenewald, the government transparency virtuoso behind the Black Vault, however, has a gift for us today: A redacted version of the classified report, obtained by filing a mandatory declassification review. This version of the report is longer and much more interesting -- detailing, for example, the most "common shapes" of UFOs spotted by the military. Certain sections of the classified report, such as one called "And a Handful of UAP Appear to Demonstrate Advanced Technology," have far more detail on specific incidents that the Department of Defense cannot explain and that are not mentioned in the public report, including seemingly two different incidents witnessed by multiple pilots and officers in the Navy. A section called "UAP Probably Lack a Single Explanation" seemingly attempts to go into greater depth exploring what those explanations could be, and also has an extra redacted paragraph about what the DoD believes could be attributed to "Foreign Adversary Systems." Most interestingly, redacted figures, images, and diagrams in the classified reports explain what the DoD believes to be the most "common shapes" of UFOs, as well as "less common/irregular shapes." These sections are completely omitted in the public report and are unfortunately redacted in the version of the report obtained by Greenewald. The classified report also explains that the FBI has investigated and will continue to investigate UFOs in an attempt to ascertain the causes of the phenomena; a redacted section seems to explain which instances it has investigated. "Given the national security implications associated with potential threats posed by UAP operating in close proximity to sensitive military activities, installations, critical infrastructure, or other national security sites, the FBI is positioned to use its investigative capabilities and authorities to support deliberate DoD and interagency efforts to determine attribution," the report reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA plans to encourage the development of another commercial vehicle that can land its Artemis astronauts on the moon. Space.com reports: In April 2021, NASA picked SpaceX to build the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program, which is working to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the decade. But SpaceX apparently won't have the moon-landing market cornered: NASA announced today (March 23) that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander. "This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe," Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a statement today. "We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the moon under NASA's guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market," Watson-Morgan added. [...] Congress is "committed to ensuring that we have more than one lander to choose [from] for future missions," [NASA Administrator Bill Nelson] said during a news conference today, citing conversations he's had with people on Capitol Hill over the past year. "We're expecting to have both Congress support and that of the Biden administration," Nelson said. "And we're expecting to get this competition started in the fiscal year [20]23 budget." Exact funding amounts and other details should be coming next week when the White House releases its 2023 federal budget request, he added. "So what we're doing today is a bit of a preview," Nelson said. "I think you'll find it's an indication that there are good things to come for this agency and, if we're right, good things to come for all of humanity." NASA plans to release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the second moon lander by the end of the month and a final RFP later this spring, agency officials said. If all goes according to plan, NASA will pick the builder of the new vehicle in early 2023. That craft will have the ability to dock with Gateway, the small moon-orbiting space station that NASA plans to build, and take people and scientific gear from there to the surface (and back). This newly announced competition will be open to all American companies except SpaceX. But Elon Musk's company will have the opportunity to negotiate the terms of its existing contract to perform additional lunar development work, NASA officials said during today's news conference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 20-year-old Ukrainian man named "Fadey" managed to escape the war and cross into Poland with 40% of his life savings in bitcoin contained on a USB stick. Finbold reports: His experience starts with the invasion and the realization that he would soon have to flee his homeland, for which he needed money. Cash was out of the question. "I couldn't withdraw cash at all, because the queues to ATMs were so long, and I couldn't wait that much time," he said. However, he had a USB stick that contained around $2,000 in Bitcoin, equalling around 40% of Fadey's life savings. The funds on the drive were accessible to him with a unique passcode, allowing him to pay for his survival in another country. "I could just write my seed phrase on a piece of paper and take it with me," he explained. The story was first reported by CNBC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A bipartisan proposal in both the House and Senate would sharply limit the ability to seize emails without notice to the owner," writes longtime Slashdot reader hawk. "It places a six-month limit on the length of gag orders in warrants." The Hill reports: The Government Surveillance Transparency Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both chambers, puts limitations on gag orders that seek to block tech companies from altering users whose data has been seized. It targets a practice brought into the spotlight after journalists from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post all had their records seized by the Department of Justice (DOJ). The bill requires law enforcement agencies to notify surveillance subjects that their email, location and web browsing data has been seized, aligning with current practices for phone records and bank data. "When the government obtains someone's emails or other digital information, users have a right to know," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a release. "Our bill ensures that no investigation will be compromised, but makes sure the government can't hide surveillance forever by misusing sealing and gag orders to prevent the American people from understanding the enormous scale of government surveillance, as well as ensuring that the targets eventually learn their personal information has been searched."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The price of Cashio's dollar-pegged stablecoin CASH has fallen from $1 to $0.00005 after an "infinite mint glitch" enabled attackers to mint tokens without providing collateral. Decrypt reports: Cashio developer 0xGhostChain took to Twitter to warn people "not to mint any CASH," adding that the team "are investigating the issue and we believe we have found the root cause. Please withdraw your funds from pools. We will publish a postmortem ASAP." According to DeFiLlama, roughly $28 million of value has been drained from Cashio's protocol due to the exploit. Still, Samczsun, a research partner at Web3 investment firm Paradigm, shared a bleaker picture on Twitter today. The researcher wrote: "Another day, another Solana fake account exploit. This time, Cashio App lost around $50M (based on a quick skim). How did this happen?" The project has not responded to Decrypt to confirm the scale of the attack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Cybersecurity researchers investigating a string of hacks against technology companies, including Microsoft and Nvidia, have traced the attacks to a 16-year-old living at his mother's house near Oxford, England. Four researchers investigating the hacking group Lapsus$, on behalf of companies that were attacked, said they believe the teenager is the mastermind. The teen is suspected by the researchers of being behind some of the major hacks carried out by Lapsus$, but they haven't been able to conclusively tie him to every hack Lapsus$ has claimed. The cyber researchers have used forensic evidence from the hacks as well as publicly available information to tie the teen to the hacking group. Bloomberg News isn't naming the alleged hacker, who goes by the online alias "White" and "breachbase," who is a minor and hasn't been publicly accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing. Another member of Lapsus$ is suspected to be a teenager residing in Brazil, according to the investigators. One person investigating the group said security researchers have identified seven unique accounts associated with the hacking group, indicating that there are likely others involved in the group's operations. The teen is so skilled at hacking — and so fast-- that researchers initially thought the activity they were observing was automated, another person involved in the research said. [...] The teenage hacker in England has had his personal information, including his address and information about his parents, posted online by rival hackers. At an address listed in the leaked materials as the teen's home near Oxford, a woman who identified herself as the boy's mother talked with a Bloomberg reporter for about 10 minutes through a doorbell intercom system. The home is a modest terraced house on a quiet side street about five miles from Oxford University. The woman said she was unaware of the allegations against her son or the leaked materials. She said she was disturbed that videos and pictures of her home and the teen's father's home were included. The mother said the teenager lives at that address and had been harassed by others, but many of the other leaked details couldn't be confirmed. She declined to discuss her son in any way or make him available for an interview, and said the issue was a matter for law enforcement and that she was contacting the police.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arizona residents can now add their drivers' license, or state ID, to Apple Wallet, which lets them use an iPhone, or Apple Watch, to check in at selected TSA checkpoints. Apple Insider reports: As Apple continues to discuss bringing digital drivers' licenses to US states, Arizona has become the first to take the system live for its residents. "We're thrilled to bring the first driver's license and state ID in Wallet to Arizona today," said Jennifer Bailey, Apple's vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, in a statement, " and provide Arizonans with an easy, secure, and private way to present their ID when traveling, through just a tap of their iPhone or Apple Watch." "We look forward to working with many more states and the TSA to bring IDs in Wallet to users across the US," she continued. At launch, Wallet can be only be used at an unspecified number of TSA security checkpoints at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Apple also announced that the states of Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, and the territory of Puerto Rico plan to bring the technology to its residents. This is in addition to seven other states that Apple previously announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. From the report: Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement. Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn't the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute "high-quality, high-resolution graphics" in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today. "He invented GIF all by himself -- he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it," Kathaleen said. "He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer." If you want to go more in-depth into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot has a good explainer of how the format became an internet phenomenon. In 2013, Wilhite weighed in on the long-standing debate about the correct pronunciation of the image format. He told The New York Times, "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Instagram will let users switch their feeds so they view the most recent posts first, relenting after years of complaints about the photo app's current ranking that chooses the order of posts based on a user's behavior. Meta's Instagram is introducing two options for its feed, "Following" and "Favorites," according to a blog post Wednesday. Following works the way Instagram did up until 2016: it shows posts in reverse-chronological order. Favorites allows further curation, letting users list up to 50 accounts they wish to see higher in their feeds. "We want people to feel good about the time they spend on Instagram, by giving them ways to shape their experience into what's best for them," the company said in a statement Wednesday. Instagram introduced an algorithmic ordering for its feed because professional users, such as influencers and brands, had started posting so frequently and strategically that they would drown out content from regular users, people familiar with the matter have said. Regular users started to think their friends weren't using Instagram. The 2016 algorithm was trained so that it showed people whatever content would inspire them to post more, the people said. While the change did help increase visibility for content from users' friends and family, it drew backlash from professionals, whose follower growth started slowing, as well as regular users, who didn't like the decrease in control. Instagram says people are more satisfied with the current algorithm's ordering, "so we are not defaulting people into a chronological feed experience,â Instagram said in its statement. "To use Favorites and Following, tap on Instagram in the top left corner of your home page to choose what you see."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general yesterday asked a federal judge to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation. From a report: "In a program called 'Communicate with Care,' Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic 'request' for counsel's advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does not respond at all," the DOJ told the court. The fact that attorneys often don't reply to the emails "underscor[es] that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence," the DOJ said. The DOJ made its argument in a motion to sanction Google "and compel disclosure of documents unjustifiably claimed by Google as attorney-client privileged" and in a memorandum in support of the motion. "The Communicate-with-Care program had no purpose except to mislead anyone who might seek the documents in an investigation, discovery, or ensuing dispute," the DOJ alleged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In three weeks of fighting, Russia has lost at least 270 tanks, according to the open source weapons tracking site Oryx -- almost 10% of its estimated active force. From a report: Ukraine's defense is proving so effective, in fact, that many analysts are attributing the failure of Russia's offense not only to its commanders, or to its tanks, but to the very idea of the tank itself, as a front-line weapon platform that can gain ground. The emerging evidence of tanks' tactical weakness is "striking," as one expert put it, and it has opened up a debate about whether tanks might be on their way to joining chariots and mounted cavalry in the boneyard of military history. Cheap, low-flying drones are striking tanks from above. Soldiers are using charred suburban landscape to ambush tanks with a new generation of fire-and-forget weapons that makes tank-killing unsettlingly simple, even in the hands of a volunteer. "An infantry that is determined to fight is now super-empowered by having things like a huge number of point-and-shoot disposable anti-tank rockets," Edward Luttwak, a military strategist who consults for governments around the world, told Insider. Tanks have ruled land warfare for more than 80 years. It's their job to punch through enemy positions so infantry can flood in and hold the newly gained ground. Tanks have long been susceptible to soldier-carried weapons like bazookas and recoilless rifles, as well as improvised explosives such as the anti-tank "sticky bombs" seen in the film "Saving Private Ryan." But looking at the ineffectiveness of Russian tank attacks in Ukraine, one can see how technology -- particularly advances in high explosives and guided missiles -- is further tipping the odds to favor anti-tank defenders, to the point where tanks could arguably be rendered obsolete. One defense analyst who spoke with Insider compared the role of tanks to that of the Swiss pikemen, Renaissance-era fighters armed with pikes and halberd who once were an army's frontlines. This vanguard role, held then by foot soldiers and now by tanks, will likely shift to drones, robotic vehicles, and long-range strike systems. "Tanks are going to move, over time, into more of a mopping-up role," said Paul Scharre, a former US Army Ranger and a director of studies at the Center for a New American Security.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the Google TV app user interface was completely redesigned and transformed into a hub for browsing movies and shows from your favorite streaming apps all in one place. It now appears that more changes are coming to the platform as Google has announced that in May 2022, movies or TV shows will no longer be available in the Google Play store. Instead, the Google TV app will be the official home for buying, renting, and watching movies and shows on your Android device. Other apps, games, and books will continue to live on the store. On Google TV, the experience of using Google Play Movies & TV will still be the same and users will get access to the latest new releases, rentals, and deals. When taking a look at the new Google TV app, customers will see a Shop tab where they can find all the titles that the tech giant offers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid increasing global regulations over app stores and their commission structures, Google today announced the launch of a pilot program designed to explore what it calls "user billing choice." From a report: The program will allow a small number of participating developers, starting with Spotify, to offer an additional third-party billing option next to Google Play's own billing system in their apps. While Google already offers a similar system in South Korea following the arrival of new legislation requiring it, this will be the first time it will test the system in global markets. As the debut pilot partner, Spotify will introduce both their own billing system alongside Google Play's own when the pilot goes live. Google did not say which other developers it has lined up for future tests, but noted Spotify was a "natural first partner" on the effort given its reach as one of the "world's largest subscription developers with a global footprint" and its "integrations across a wide range of device form factors." Spotify, of course, has also been one of the larger developers to push for regulatory changes to app stores' existing billing systems, having testified before Congress on the matter, joined lobbying groups, and backed app store legislation, including the Open Markets Act, that would require companies like Apple and Google to permit alternatives to existing app stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia, one of the largest buyers of outsourced chip production, said it will explore using Intel as a possible manufacturer of its products, but said Intel's journey to becoming a foundry will be difficult. From a report: Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said he wants to diversify his company's suppliers as much as possible and will consider working with Intel. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics to build its products. "We're very open-minded to considering Intel," Huang said Wednesday in an online company event. "Foundry discussions take a long time. It's not just about desire. We're not buying milk here."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it will expand its cybersecurity skilling initiative to 23 additional countries. The campaign, which began last year in the U.S., is part of the company's push to help solve the cybersecurity industry's growing talent problem, while also helping diversify the industry. From a report: Like many industries within tech, cybersecurity is facing both a workforce shortage and a widening skills gap among workers. According to Kate Behncken, vice president and lead of Microsoft Philanthropies, by 2025 there will be 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs open globally. Microsoft originally launched the skilling campaign in the U.S. last fall, partnering with 135 community colleges to skill and recruit workers into the cybersecurity industry. By expanding skilling and training to 23 countries, Microsoft aims to get ahead of the demand. The countries, which include Australia, Brazil, Canada and India, were chosen due to their "elevated cyberthreat risk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia's record-breaking wildfires of 2019 and 2020 blasted smoke so high that even the ozone layer in the stratosphere was damaged, a new analysis shows. Hmmmmmm shares a report: The Black Summer bushfires, which raged along Australia's east coast from November 2019 to January 2020, caused unprecedented destruction. The fires burned more than 70,000 square kilometres of bushland, destroyed more than 3000 homes, and killed more than 30 people and billions of animals. Smoke billowed all the way to South America and triggered distant ocean algal blooms. Now, Peter Bernath at Old Dominion University in Virginia and his colleagues have shown that the smoke also pushed its way up into the stratosphere and triggered chemical reactions that destroyed ozone. They analysed data from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment satellite, which monitors levels of 44 different molecules in the atmosphere. This revealed that stratospheric ozone declined by 13 per cent in the middle latitude area of the southern hemisphere -- which includes Australia -- in the aftermath of the Black Summer fires.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced an update to its translation services that, thanks to new machine learning techniques, promises significantly improved translations between a large number of language pairs. TechCrunch reports: Based on its Project Z-Code, which uses a "spare Mixture of Experts" approach, these new models now often score between 3% and 15% better than the company's previous models during blind evaluations. Z-Code is part of Microsoft's wider XYZ-Code initiative that looks at combining models for text, vision and audio across multiple languages to create more powerful and helpful AI systems. "Mixture of Experts" isn't a completely new technique, but it's especially useful in the context of translation. At its core, the system basically breaks down tasks into multiple subtasks and then delegates them to smaller, more specialized models called "experts." The model then decides which task to delegate to which expert, based on its own predictions. Greatly simplified, you can think of it as a model that includes multiple more specialized models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.